A public transportation system is one of the most complex environments to secure as its characteristics—open access, multiple and frequent stops, and large geographic coverage areas—make it vulnerable to a variety of threats. As a result, transportation authorities face significant challenges to provide end-to-end, system-wide security for their customers, employees, and assets without impacting the smooth flow of passengers, and vehicles throughout the transit system.
The field of passenger security systems has been growing into prominence for many years now and especially so after the events of Sep. 11, 2001, in New York, the 2004 Madrid bombings, and the London attacks in 2005 that have brought into prime focus the need for providing transit security, monitoring transit passengers, to identify security-related events, and to provide notification to the authorities to enable them to take timely action.
The following are reasons why we will need an improved transit security system. Firstly, time is of the essence when it comes to identifying an event (or sometimes more than one event), providing notification of the identified event and initiating a response action based on the notification to resolve the event. Unless the above actions are performed effectively and efficiently, the provided response may be of little use. Examples of events include an opening of a door while a transit vehicle is in motion, non-opening of a door when the transit vehicle is at a terminal, detection of unattended baggage, unauthorized entry, smoke, sounding of a fire alarm, breaking of a window, fall of a person, attack of one person by another, initiation of emergency braking, uncommon sounds like the burst of a firearm or explosive, commotion within the transit vehicle, etc.
Secondly, once the event is detected, the individual security operator has to initiate a series of actions to resolve the identified event. Unfortunately, in existing systems, it becomes inefficient for the security operator to study the event further. In cases where multiple security events are identified, the security operator receives multiple notifications of the events. It becomes the duty of the security operator to study each of those notifications and respond accordingly.
Thirdly, the security systems that currently exist in the passenger rail market have been lacking in their sophistication, and have been primarily focused on providing digital recording of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and providing audio telemetry. Each of these service-providing devices acts in an uncontrolled or unsynchronized manner to provide separate notifications of security events. Furthermore, they have been relatively non-intelligent systems, which are typically represented by individual encoding/recording units placed in each of the cars in a train consist and have limited to no capabilities of wireless transmission and synchronization with wayside infrastructure. Also, the current transit security systems are more static and less intelligent.
Therefore, there is a clear need for a transit security system that overcomes some or all of the inefficiencies of the existing systems.